Jack of Harts

I’ve been trying to come up with a good cover image for this story off and on for months. None of what I came up with was good enough.

It seems that catgirls and bright primary colors mixed together cause many AI art engines to go a bit wacko on what they want to show me versus what I’m asking for. Getting the right mix was more than I could figure out. I’ve had a lot of experience by now with AI art, but this one was just evading me.

But a few months ago, I started using Forge, which is a local installation that uses local machine power to run AI art. And if you have the firepower to run Forge, you can generate much better images than off most of the free AI art generators out there. I do not count the paid AI art generators in that, because they are just a lot better than the free ones. Even the paid for ones with a free tier end up being less powerful on the free tier. I’ve used Dezgo for a long time, and I’ve gotten a lot of good images and character art from them, but Forge is a whole new animal.

And no, I didn’t buy new machines. My stuff is still 10 years old or more. I just put in some slightly better video cards and cranked their RAM up. Cheap upgrades for old machines that gave them a new life. Good enough to just barely be able to run Forge, using massive memory offloading, and as long as I’m willing to accept waiting hours for a run of images. As it turns out, I’m a patient man, and it worked for me in this case.

After months of trying to get a good image on the free generators, or the free-to-me based on memberships, I finally tried out Forge for this project. I ran up a batch and… what do you know? I got what I wanted. It took some trial and error. The first few batches were junk, but as I iterated through the prompting, figured out where it was going wrong, and modified my prompts, I finally got the output I was looking for.

A catgirl on a world named New Kyushu wearing a trenchcoat and normal clothing. You would be amazed how resistant to that basic idea most generators are. But Forge with the best Juggernaut ever made, Ragnorak, and a lot of tweaking and pushing, got me what I asked for. This really is a wonderful world for a tech geek. I’m a good writer, but not so good at painting with my fingers. But I can write good enough to get what I envision from the better AI art machines out there. It’s just a matter of figuring out what their code wants and giving it to them. It’s programing, just with art being the final result, and the little programmer in me really loves that part.

I hope you enjoy the final result. Here is Reina One, born of Los Angeles. New Japan. The home of the Empress of Japan. And yes, she is a genuine gengineered catgirl of New Japan.